Toxic ‘Forever Chemicals’ in Drinking Water Leave Military Families Reeling

FOUNTAIN, Colo. — When Army Staff Sgt. Samuel Fortune returned from Iraq, his body battered by war, he assumed he’d be safe.

Then the people around him began to get sick. His neighbors, all living near five military bases, complained of tumors, thyroid problems and debilitating fatigue. Soon, the Colorado health department announced an unusually high number of kidney cancers in the region. Then Mr. Fortune’s wife fell ill.

The military, it turned out, had been leaching toxic chemicals into the water for decades.

Mr. Fortune felt “stabbed in the back,” he said. “We give our lives and our bodies for our country, and our government does not live up to their end of the deal.”

That was 2016. Since then, the Defense Department has admitted that it allowed a firefighting foam to slip into at least 55 drinking water systems at military bases around the globe, sometimes for generations. This exposed tens of thousands of Americans, possibly many more, to per-andpolyfluoroalkyl substances, a group of man-made chemicals known as PFAS that have been linked to cancers, immune suppression and other serious health problems.

Though the presence of the chemicals has been known for years, an announcement last week from the Environmental Protection Agency for the first time promised regulatory action, a significant acknowledgment of the startling scope of the problem that drew outrage from veterans and others living in contaminated communities.

Acting administrator Andrew Wheeler said that the agency would begin the process of potentially limiting the presence of two of the compounds in drinking water, calling this a “pivotal moment in the history of the agency.”

The admission drew some praise, but many said that it was not enough and that millions of people would keep ingesting the substances while a regulatory process plods along. “It should have been called an inaction plan,” said Judith Enck, a former E.P.A. regional administrator appointed by President Barack Obama.

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Volunteers distributed bottled water to residents of Security, Colo., in 2016.CreditMatthew Staver for The New York Times

While the military has used the chemicals extensively, it is far from the only entity to do so, and in recent years, companies like DuPont have come under fire for leaching PFAS into water systems.

All told, 10 million people could be drinking water laced with high levels of PFAS, according to Patrick Breysse, a top official at the federal Centers for Disease Control. Mr. Breysse has called the presence of the chemicals “one of the most seminal public health challenges” of the coming decades.

The residents of Fountain, a mountain-flanked suburb of Colorado Springs, were told of the contamination by local officials who had been required by the E.P.A. to test the water for the substances, a step toward possible regulation. Soon dozens of communities from New York to Washington State discovered their drinking water was also polluted with PFAS.

Many people began demanding that state and military officials test their blood for the chemicals, hoping to learn the extent of their presence in their bodies.

The military has started an expensive cleanup effort that has involved shifting entire municipalities to new water sources and assessing toxic plumes that continue to spread for miles.

Maureen Sullivan, the military’s deputy assistant secretary for environment, said the government had moved “aggressively” to tackle the problem, assessing cleanup duties and looking for alternatives to the firefighting foam, a version of which the military still uses.

“I’m proud of what the Department of Defense has done in the past two-plus years,” she said.

But frustration persists. The military never alerted all of the people who drank polluted water, meaning some are still in the dark. When asked how many people were affected by contamination, Ms. Sullivan said she “couldn’t hazard a guess.”

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“We’re tracking water sources,” she said, “not people.”

Local and state governments have had to carve millions from their budgets to deal with the problem, much of which may never be paid back. In places like Oscoda, Mich., where the lake now froths with toxic foam, residents are fighting with defense officials over the extent to which the military must clean up the mess.

“When I was in the Air Force, they preached all the time: ‘Do the right thing. Integrity first. Service before self. Excellence in all we do’,” said Aaron Weed, a 22-year veteran who is now Oscoda’s town supervisor. “This is not the Air Force that I was a part of,” he continued. “The side of the Air Force that I am seeing is just disgraceful.”

Blood testing has emerged as a sticking point. Specifically, a growing movement of veterans and others, united in advocacy groups with names like Fountain Valley Clean Water Coalition and Need Our Water, are asking the military test their blood for the chemicals, hoping to bring results to their doctors or use them in lawsuits.

Their requests have been denied, and the military says that too little is known about the substances to make the results useful. Instead, it will pay for the C.D.C. to start yearslong population-based health studies in some communities.

“They don’t want to know,” said Cindi Ashbeck, 56, a veteran who worked out of Wurtsmith Air Force Base in Michigan. “It’s not being addressed, because you open that can of worms, and you’ve got an Agent Orange thing on your hands.”

PFAS are a broad class of chemicals developed in the 1940s. Because they repel grease and water, they have been used across industries for decades, often to prevent stains. They are placed in a dizzying array of products: food packaging, nonstick pans, clothing, furniture. They are also used to extinguish fires where petroleum-based explosions pose a danger.

But the chemicals move quickly through the earth and into water, where they persist indefinitely. Some scientists have deemed them “forever chemicals,” and over the last two decades, a growing body of research has shown that the compounds meant to help us are likely hurting us.

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“We give our lives and our bodies for our country, and our government does not live up to their end of the deal,” said Samuel Fortune, who served two tours in Iraq.

The most comprehensive data, based on a study of 69,000 people living near in a West Virginia DuPont plant, say exposure is associated with kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, high cholesterol and ulcerative colitis, among other problems, while animal studies show delays in development.

Mr. Fortune grew up in Sheridan, Wyo., where joining the Army was the way to avoid the coal mine or a job at Wal-Mart, he said.

He enlisted in 1998, serving two tours in Iraq as a mechanic. On his final visit, while he was waiting on the airfield for his ride out of the country, enemy mortar threw him against a wall meant to fortify the area, damaging his back and tearing all the tendons in his shoulders. He had to be rebuilt, with metal. “Five rods, two plates, nine screws, 10 nails, 20 staples,” he said. “I make an X-ray glow.”

The Army then stationed Mr. Fortune in Colorado Springs, home to five military bases, placing him, his wife, Bianca, and their children, Bryan and Sophia, in the center of a contamination zone.

He learned about the contamination in 2016. The military said it had come from the Peterson Air Force Base nearby. His family had been drinking the water for a decade.

Soon, Ms. Fortune was in and out of the hospital, and Mr. Fortune became increasingly concerned that the cause was the chemicals. His wife told doctors of a debilitating pain in her right abdomen, intense joint pain and exhaustion. Her blood cell counts rose and fell like yo-yos. Some doctors thought it was Lyme disease; others weren’t so sure.

Like many around the country, Mr. Fortune has joined one of several lawsuits against the companies that made the firefighting foam, including 3M and Tyco Fire Products. Others, including the City of Newburgh, N.Y., are suing the military directly.

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Steve Patterson, whose family members learned they had been drinking contaminated water for decades, has lost several of his relatives to cancer in recent years.CreditRyan David Brown for The New York Times

But the lawyer in the Colorado case, David McDivitt, said he thought that would be too difficult because “it’s tough to sue the federal government.”

For years, there were signs that the chemicals in the military’s firefighting foam were dangerous. Defense Department studies dating to the 1970s indicated that the substances were harmful to laboratory animals, according to an investigation by The Colorado Springs Gazette, and the Army Corps of Engineers told Fort Carson to stop using the foam in 1991, calling it “harmful to the environment.”

In 2000, under pressure from the E.P.A., 3M phased out production of some of the compounds, announcing that they could “could potentially pose a risk to human health.” Five years later, the E.P.A. declared that another compound was “likely to be carcinogenic to humans.”

But the military has said it continued to use firefighting foams containing the compounds because companies have continued to produce them and the E.P.A. doesn’t regulate them.

Industry officials have said they are following E.P.A. rules, while the E.P.A. has said it is still exploring regulation.

In Fountain, the Defense Department has installed short-term water filters and is building treatment plants meant to fix the problem in the long-term. This has won the praise of some local officials. “We’re pleased with where we’re at,” said Curtis Mitchell of the Fountain water district.

Not everyone agrees.

After news broke of the contamination in Fountain and nearby communities, the Colorado health department said that while the area had a higher-than-normal rate of several cancers, that might be explained by high rates of obesity and smoking in the region.

Steve Patterson, 62, whose family had been drinking fouled water for decades, is skeptical of that explanation. A dozen of his relatives have died of cancer, some genetically related to him, some not.

Mr. Fortune recently began asking the military to test his wife’s blood for the substances.

When officials declined, Mr. Fortune persisted, he said, and medical staff called him aggressive. “I’m not aggressive, I’m angry,” he said. “If you’re being poisoned, you want to know what it is, what it’s doing to you, and what you can do to stop it.”

Follow Julie Turkewitz on Twitter @julieturkewitz.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Stabbed in the Back’: Polluted Water Pains Military Families. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe